Headings

When I started working on my first website several years back, I had a very basic idea of what headings were. However, I had no clue how to use them properly nor did I really understand their importance in regards to SEO.

The good news is that this isn’t a complicated topic or concept. Yet, it can easily be the difference of whether your website ranks on page one, or on page four.

When working with WordPress, you have the choice to write your pages and posts either using a visual editor or a text editor. To skip any of the hassle of dealing with HTML, choose the visual editor.

After choosing this option, all you need to do to turn some text into a heading, thus creating h tags in the the HTML, is highlight the text with your cursor and choose which heading, 1 through 6, that you want.

Direct SEO Implications

A search engine algorithm understands that a well-written piece of website content will use its headings like an outline. Therefore, using h tags instead of just bolding text is extremely important.

So, what should you use for your headings and h tags?

The quick and easy answer is to simply keep them clear and logical. And, don’t forget to toss some keywords in there as well. Just don’t keyword stuff.

TB Tip: Try to keep you page titles, which should end up inside an H1 tag, to a maximum of 50-60 characters in length. Otherwise, your title will get cutoff on Google’s search results pages.

Indirect SEO Implications

Beside the direct impact to SEO that having clear, organized, and topic-focused headings has, there’s some indirect implications as well.

Google’s search algorytm uses over 200 factors when considering what sites rank well and for what terms. User metrics are absolutely including in these factors.

What are user metrics? They’re bits of measurable information such as:

how long a visitor stays on a page/post

how many pages/posts a visitor visits

did a visitor engage with the page/post (share it on a social network, play a video, etc.)

Headings can play a major role in those first two bullet points.

Just as h tags do for search engine spiders, headings help a reader quickly know what your page or post is going to cover. They also break up the page into easier to consume chunks.

Do you think a reader will stay longer on a page that is visually appealing and looks like a quick read, or one that’s giant wall of dense text?

TB Tip: Some themes allow you to easily adjust the size and color of your headings. Headings that are a different color than the text can really pop.

Conclusion

This mini-guide to website page headings is geared towards SEO best practices. If you plan to focus on buying website traffic with ads, or on using a viral clickbait strategy, you may have to adapt some of this info.

But even then, keeping SEO in mind while designing your pages can be the difference between being slightly profitable and very profitable.